SHANKAR FOUNDATION GETS GRAMMY GRANT

ENCINITAS 
Pioneering Indian classical music performer and composer Ravi Shankar is one of 18 recipients of a Grammy Foundation Grant. Shankar, a longtime Encinitas resident who turned 92 on Saturday, is one of the most prolific artists in any idiom. He recorded his latest album, the just-released “The Living Room Sessions, Part 1,” last fall at his North County home.

The Grammy Foundation grant of $16,420 was awarded to the Encinitas-based Ravi Shankar Foundation. The grant will help fund a project designed, as the Grammy Foundation describes it, “to preserve, digitize, catalog, and provide access to historic live and studio recordings from two of the most prolific points in Ravi Shankar’s career. These recordings are unavailable anywhere else in any format and are at risk of deterioration in their analog state. The result will be an accessible collection of Shankar’s most important performances, greatly impacting scholarship and programming, both nationally and internationally.”

Other recipients include Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the University of Miami and Canada’s Western University.

“For nearly 25 years, our Grammy Foundation Grant Program has been a leader in funding an extraordinary range of scientific research, archiving and preservation projects,” said Neil Portnow, president/CEO of the Recording Academy and the Grammy Foundation.

“We have provided support for research that seeks to help individuals with speech and movement difficulties, and for a project that will prepare a significant collection of African-American gospel and blues from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta for digitizing and preservation.”

The Grammy Foundation Grant Program is funded by the Recording Academy, under whose auspices the Grammy Awards are presented. Since 1989, the foundation has given nearly $6 million in grants.